American Streamlined Design Presented At Montreal Museum

American industrial designers gave everyday objects glamorous new forms in steel, aluminum and experimental plastics to reflect the world of tomorrow. The exhibition focuses primarily on the impact of American Streamlined design in the 1930s and 1940s with a wide range of exhibits drawn from the domestic sphere, the commercial world, interior decoration, sports and leisure. Some 180 examples of furniture, ceramics, metalwork, plastics, graphic design and books make up the exhibits, which also illustrate the continuing influence of this pioneering design aesthetic today.

A Unique Stylistic Expression

From the Twentieth Century Limited train and Chrysler’s Airflow automobile to the Zephyr digital clock, the aerodynamic style known as streamlining endowed many classic American products with a futuristic sheen – the glamour of speed. The American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow exhibition offers a fresh appraisal of the aesthetic of this style, placing the achievements of its best-known exponents – among them Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfuss, Raymond Loewy and Walter Dorwin Teague – beside the contributions of other lesser-known but significant designers such as Lurelle Guild, Clifford Brooks Stevens, Harold Van Doren and newly discovered practitioners like John R. Morgan, William B. Petzold and Louis Vavrik. This exhibition also makes a case for the vigour of streamlining in today’s design. Among the contemporary designers represented are Jasper Morrison (Thinking Man’s Chair, 1986), Ross Lovegrove (Go Chair, 1999) and Scott Patt (Air Max Contact sneakers for Nike, 2001).

The exhibits range from a humble computer-card hole-puncher, roasting pan and chrome-plated iron to a lounge chair created of tubular steel and leather, boldly canted as if straining into the future. Although this armchair would look perfectly at home on the deck of an ocean liner, its daring simplification of line belies the engineering bravura of its California designer, Kem Weber. Other objects in the exhibition speak to the birth of American consumerism, when time-saving new products promised a better world for everyone. The streamlined mixers, blenders, juicers, rotisseries and toasters that were flaunted by housewives; the bullet-like soda siphons, torpedo-shaped power drills and pipes with speed lines enjoyed by suburban husbands; and the juke boxes, portable radios, and model airplanes of the younger sets – are all represented in American Streamlined Design: The World of Tomorrow.

The Eric Brill Collection

Most of the objects in the show have been selected from the Eric Brill Collection, which comprises over 900 examples of American industrial design assembled by this one collector over the last three decades and donated to the Liliane and David M. Stewart Program for Modern Design. Continuing her most generous support of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Mrs. Stewart is giving the works of the Brill Collection to the MMFA to be integrated into its internationally recognized Liliane and David M. Stewart collection of design.

The exhibition, which has already been shown at the Musée des années 30 in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, at the Georgia Museum of Art and the Bard Graduate Center, is now touring North America through January 2009. In addition to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, it will be shown at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the Chicago History Museum and the Wolfsonian-Florida International University. -- www.mmfa.qc.ca